Maximus the Confessor clearly distinguishes two freedoms in Man: that of his nature and that of his person. The first is the magnetic attraction of his deepest being towards God, the completion of his nature in love; indeed, Man desires love with his whole nature and finds fulfillment in it. Human beings conceal within themselves an ‘immense capacity for love and joy which is effective from the moment it knows the presence of the Beauty par excellence, the Beloved’ (Nicholas Cabasilas, Life in Christ). In the great union of love, human nature finds what it desires, the attainment of spontaneity, of freedom.
It is Christ who brings about this restoration of fullness. We have only to be grafted, by baptism and the Eucharist, on to his deifying body, for this unifying energy to spring up from our inner depths.
But Maximus reminds us that there is another, strictly personal freedom, which cannot be constrained, or modified in any way from outside.
Although Christ restores and renews our nature, he cannot take upon himself our personal freedom, for the person is an absolute that nothing, not even God, can assume or transform. That freedom God can only appeal to by the example of his love. So he takes flesh, suffers and dies for us, for ‘greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends’. By his love for human beings he is utterly destroyed; he allows the despair of separated humanity to enter into himself, to the point that an unthinkable chasm is opened between God and God, between the Father and the crucified Son, as if God dying in the flesh on the cross experienced atheism in its most hellish form: ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ The infinite contradiction between the Living and the Crucified God is witness to humanity that God is infinite love, the love that Maximus the Confessor and Nicholas Cabasilas have called ‘mad’.
‘Two things in particular denote the lover and ensure his conquest: to do well to the beloved by every possible means, and if necessary to suffer evils and terrible torments on the beloved’s behalf. The second proof is far superior to the first, but God, being impassible, was powerless to give it . . . So he devised this ‘humiliation’, adapting himself in whatever way was necessary for him to be able to undergo evils and torments, so that those for whom he suffered might be convinced of his love’ (Nicholas Cabasilas, Life in Christ).
So love responds to love, and personal freedom reawakens of its own accord. Eventually ‘man surrenders only under the extreme pressure of God’s humiliation’ (Maximus the Confessor, Second Letter to Thomas).
In Christ, God loved his enemies more than himself. Such is the mystery of personal love. In the image of God, human beings become capable of loving others more than themselves – not more than their personal existence (‘thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself) but more than their own nature, their own life. Human beings become fully persons when they transcend their own nature in giving their life not only for their friends but for their enemies. That is why, according to the staretz Silhouan of Athos, the love of enemies is the only infallible criterion of our spiritual progress.
From Olivier Clement, On Human Being: A Spiritual Anthropology
